It’s a click-and-drag game, where you click on your characters to see how they are doing; and drag to put them in different rooms where they can work, relax or spend quality time with a significant other. You can zoom in with a double-tap, and there’s a kind of primitive 3D to the rooms. It’s a little cumbersome even on a relatively large iPad screen, as it’s very easy to snag a character unintentionally when you were trying to click on the one next to them.

Todd Howard compared it to Little Computer People and that’s pretty close to the mark. When someone appears at the Vault door, you check their S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats to see if they have any particular talents, and you can assign them to rooms where they’ll be most useful based on these skills. While this isn’t particularly intuitive (Why do the most agile people belong in the food prep areas?), this is the closest thing to careers your little people will have.

The needs of your Vault Dwellers are simple: They require food, water, and energy. To that end, you build rooms for generators, water purifiers, and diners. Once you get more Dwellers, you can build other rooms such as medbays, gyms, game rooms, and various other things that will raise your characters’ S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats.

Repopulate Our Great Nation

The thing that keeps the game going is the idea of building these extra rooms and making your vault bigger and more extravagant. However, the thing that keeps you from building those is the amount of Vault Dwellers you have. Unfortunately, you’ll sometimes hit inexplicable roadblocks that seem to prevent you from recruiting the needed number of Dwellers.

In one of the three vaults I built, I made it to 13 Dwellers and then couldn’t seem to recruit anymore. This was particularly annoying because that was one less than the needed number to build a medbay. I had to wait three hours for one of my pregnant women to give birth before I would meet the number requirement.

That’s another thing: You can pair up any man and woman in one of the Vault’s residential spaces, and they’ll eventually create a new life. There’s something a little unpleasant about the idea of breeding your Vault Dwellers, especially since there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason to who can pair up and what difference it makes to their offspring.

War Never Changes… Bethesda Does

I don’t mean to seem like the sort of overzealous fan that exists to pick nits, but I don’t think this game looks or feels like a Fallout game at all. If I hadn’t seen Bethesda introduce it themselves with great pomp and circumstance at the show, I would think it was something made by a third-party developer whose only experience with the series was playing the first ten minutes of Fallout 3.

Maybe that’s it: Maybe this is supposed to be an elaborate game within a game, something the Vault-Tec people would install on everyone’s Pip-Boys to keep them preoccupied. Or maybe it’s something that was thrown together as a cheap tie-in to hold us all over until November.

Also, I don’t really see what the point of the game is for Fallout fans. Granted, I’ve not put weeks of time into the game yet, but I don’t see anything that will be an in-game reward for Fallout 4.

Lunch box = $0.99

I suppose the final question would be, “Is it fun?” Yes, it is fun, if a little bit slow. Granted, it picks up steam once you’ve got enough caps to do stuff besides provide for basic needs. You can build new rooms, breed new Dwellers, or equip your people for jaunts into the Wasteland.

You can also complete little objectives to get caps and sometimes lunch boxes. The latter are loot containers which give you items, resources, and occasionally a special Vault Dweller — I got Amata and I saw someone else with Three Dog.

The author of this article seems to be trying really hard to slam the game. Honestly, the lunchboxes are plentiful enough to where you'll never have to buy them, and being snarky about a feature that costs money in the year 2015 just shows a snobbishness about the writer. This game is entirely fallout in feel, and it goes back to the older fallout games in looks. The humor and actions are entirely "Fallout" and the writer being angry that there wasn't some free Fallout 4 buff to be gained from playing certainly says a lot that I don't need to say about them. This article was a waste of a read.

Rachel is MUO's Gaming Editor, from Austin, Texas. She spends most of her time writing, gaming, reading, and writing about gaming and reading. Did I mention she writes? During her freakish bouts of non-writing, she plots world domination and does a dead-on Lara Croft impersonation.